Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the graphics cards do at idle, during gaming and finally under a full load.

We recorded temperatures during several scenarios on each of the cards we tested today and the benchmark results are shown above. Our temperature chart was getting pretty crazy with over 20 cards in it, so we removed all of the other cards with the exception of the three Radeon HD 7770 cards that we have available to us. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC has a single 10CM (100MM) fan on it and it doesn’t have to spin that fast to push a significant amount of air, which means it is quiet. It also uses a rather large radial heatsink, so it looks like it should cool really well. Our testing showed that compared to the AMD Reference GPU cooler it was 1C cooler at an idle and 7C cooler in Furmark. In gaming we found it to be 4C cooler, which is an important number as that is what most of our readers do! The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC video card GPU cooler was found to perform better than the XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition Double Dissipation cooler by 2C in Furmark and an impressive 6C during gameplay.

When we were testing the Radeon HD 7770 video cards we noticed that they sounded slightly different, so we used a sound meter to see what the difference was.

We recently upgraded our sound meter to an Extech sound level meter with ±1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 38dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data. We will be comparing the Gigabyte and AMD reference design models for this review.

The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC was found to be about 1dBA lower at idle and when running Furmark, but it was 1dBA higher during gaming. All of the Radeon HD 7770 cards that we have benchmarked have been very quiet, so no one should have an issue with fan noise on these cards. It’s likely the case fans in your PC case are louder than this cards cooler!